An Argument For Big Government

by Eric Rawlins

The peak smog year ever in Los Angeles
was 1955. That is why I believe in big government and high taxes.

When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area
in 1963, I had a room in the Berkeley hills with a fine view westward
across the bay to San Francisco. At least it would be a fine view today;
back then it sometimes was and sometimes wasn't. Often what I would
get was a view into a featureless gray-brown haze, where San Francisco—and
sometimes even Treasure Island halfway across the bay—simply disappeared
outright into a smoggy soup.

It was like that all over back then,
and many of us today have forgotten how bad it really was. The early
Sixties were the days when urban rivers like the Cleveland River used
to catch fire. Boston Harbor was a famous cesspool. People made jokes
about painting the Hudson blue, and if you drove south from San Francisco
it smelled like cheese any time of the day or night from the raw sewage
that lapped up along the bay shore next to the highway.

We still have environmental problems,
of course. But in 2004 you can see clear across San Francisco Bay every
day, you can swim in the Hudson, and no urban river ever catches on
fire.

How did such a thing come about?
How is it that L.A. air can be better today than it was 50 years ago,
despite the fact that the population has doubled and traffic levels
quadrupled in that time?

The answer does not lie in the good
intentions of industrialists or consumers; nor the efforts of earnest
do-gooders; nor even the inevitable tides of historical progress. The
plain answer, uncomfortable as it may be to those who believe in "free
enterprise" and "small government", is that the air and
water are cleaner than they used to be because government chose to
make it so, and for no other reason. Today cars run cleaner
and factories have scrubbers on their smokestacks, but the industrialists
who installed those engines and scrubbers fought tooth and nail then—as
they do today—against every law that made them do so. If allowed
today, corporations would improve their bottom line and return the Bay
and the Hudson to its 1960 state without hesitating as much as a heartbeat.

But as it happened, people wanted
cleaner air and water, and they prevailed on their government to make
it so. And since the government was in the hands of people who at some
level shared that concern, it was made so. The car manufacturers and factory operators were brought under
control, and no other entity—not ecological think tanks, nor benevolent
foundations, nor any group of private citizens, nor even the corporations
themselves (who, after all, have their stockholders to answer to)—would
have had the muscle to bring it off.

If you ask people why America is
a great country, the answer you are as likely to get as any other is
that this is a place where "any kid can grow up to be President"
(or a CEO, or some other top-of-the-food-chain position). There is plenty
of truth to that, but I think it misses the mark. For one thing, people
of ability and drive manage to succeed in most times and places, including
in societies far more rigid than ours. Even a hereditary aristocracy
like Tudor England had its Thomas Cromwells and William Cecils.

But more importantly, one might
ask whether providing a more commodious upward path for the ambitious
and driven is really the greatest gift American society has to grant.

For my money, the greatest accomplishment
in this country's history is this: that America found a way that ordinary
workers could do honest work for a living wage, and be treated decently
for it. American society found a way for its ordinary members to share
in the progress society made and the wealth society generated. It found
a way to turn serfs and wage slaves into citizens—complete with dignity, a
degree of control over their own lives, and a modicum of material comfort.

It had never happened before, and
it did not occur naturally. It was certainly not a natural outgrowth
of laissez-faire capitalism, as a brief glance at
19th-century history, with its 72-hour work weeks, disease-ridden slums,
and murdered labor organizers will show. Capitalism is a matchless engine
for generating wealth, but it does not ensure that that wealth will
be shared. On the contrary, unregulated capitalism tends always toward
concentration: concentration of production into fewer and fewer
companies, and concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Without
governmental oversight, the profits of large corporations simply go
into the pockets of their owners.

This crowning achievement of American
culture was a deliberate invention of the 20th century. It came about,
once again, because government decided to make it that way, and government has kept it that
way for 50 years through countless laws, commissions and other controls,
from the GI Bill to the SEC to OSHA. The US government has spent the
last two generations keeping American society from becoming a duplicate
of Argentina's.

In our lifetime, the federal government
has been the best friend the American citizen has ever had.

It is an astonishing accomplishment
of the corporate right that it has managed to convince ordinary Americans
that the government is somehow their enemy—that there is some
need to get government "off our backs." Long lines at the
Department of Motor Vehicles notwithstanding, government
spends most of its time on the backs of corporations, not individuals—which
is why the corporate right is so determined to starve government to
death with tax cuts and deficit spending. But the governmental mechanisms
that have kept the environment habitable for the last 30 years, and
working Americans prosperous for the last 50, are today being systematically
dismantled. Future generations may well look back on the period from
1950 to 2000 as the golden age of the ordinary American—those
bygone days when a worker could have a good life.

Is government corrupt? Often. Does
it work against the interests of ordinary people? Sometimes. Is it inefficient?
Always. But of all the forces at work in shaping the world I have to
live in, it is the only one whose decisions I can hope to affect even
slightly, whose processes are more or less open to my scrutiny, and
who has my welfare at least a tiny bit at heart. None of that is true
of Archer Daniels Midland or Time/Warner. For that reason, I want government
big and I want it powerful.

Ford Motor Company used to hire
spies to investigate the private lives of its employees to make sure
they were behaving in ways the company approved of, and it was not shy
about firing those who weren't. Mining companies in Appalachia used
to simply gun down anyone who demanded a decent living wage. If those
days are not to return again, we need a government that is powerful
enough—and rich enough—to do battle with the other powerful
forces in this land—to prevail on them to do what is right and
not just what is profitable.